A memory system, such as a solid-state drive (SSD), can contain a plurality of memory dies (e.g., in a multi-die package) that can be read or written in parallel. During read and write operations, the memory system consumes power and generates heat. Very intensive or long-running, sustained workloads (especially write-oriented workloads) can cause the memory system to generate so much heat that it can exceed its operating temperature. In such situations, the controller can perform a thermal throttling operation to reduce the memory system's temperature by slowing the throughput of the memory system, thus allowing the overheating components to cool down. This is typically accomplished by reducing die parallelism or by inserting artificial delays in operational flows.